How to Use Markdown Everywhere

I haven’t always loved plain text syntax. Once I embraced git as the langua franca of IT Operations, I knew that made Markdown required knowledge. Fast forward a few years and many thousands of lines later and I’m in love.

For instance, the fact that **bold** renders as bold no matter where I type it and no amount of copy-and-pasting will make the format change is just too tempting to pass up. With that in mind, here’s my collection of handy applications and conversion tools I keep around. The meaty part comes from converting from non-Markdown to Markdown, so dive right into that if you’re interested.

Writing in Markdown

Notes - if you are starting from scratch, decide between Bear App or the do-it-yourself Joplin. The latter is open source and robust and the former is simple, sleek, and inexpensive.

Todo List - Todoist is Markdown compatible by default (and supports emojis 💥), which is why I continue to use it for all my task management.

Writing - if you can, ditch your CMS and Word docs for a git repository. Honestly, it’s simple, gives you all the benefits of version control, and keeps you focused on the text more than the styling.

Converting Non-Markdown to Markdown

Rich text - wrote something in that undesirable rich text format? It’s cool, MarkdownIt gives you the quickest way to convert. It’s a little clumsy with links, but gets you 90% closer than you would writing and rewriting [link](http://link).